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Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky and his colleague John Felton, the finance chief at Amazon Web Services, are among the key leaders who are driving innovation at the e-commerce giant and their latest generative AI initiatives.
After years of study, Amazon.com’s finance teams in particular are using generative AI in new ways to drive efficiency, including new ways to more efficiently comply with complex tax regulations and help evaluate the financial impact of new products, they tell my colleague Mark Maurer, who wrote about the latest AI use cases.
Mark took a few moments to answer questions for the WSJ Leadership Institute’s CFO Journal about his latest reporting.
What struck you most about the new use cases that Amazon's finance team is implementing now?
Mark: Amazon’s finance teams have moved into a phase with AI that largely goes beyond the automation of rote back-office processes taking place at many companies. Executives there told me that Amazon has expanded the areas of finance where it uses generative artificial intelligence over the past year. One example: Companies analyze their transfer pricing, or internal corporate transactions across borders, to make sure they’re comparable to market prices. Amazon uses generative AI to analyze more than 600,000 companies as part of the benchmarking analysis. The AI tool could reduce the time to complete such an analysis by at least half, Felton said, citing initial testing.
Why are Amazon and Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing unit, doing this now?
Mark: There have been significant developments in the technology in the past year alone. Use cases at Amazon and other companies have expanded as the technology, particularly agentic AI, has advanced.
What impact do you see AI having on finance jobs going forward?
Mark: Corporate executives say AI will absolutely change what skills finance professionals will need in the future. Olsavsky said the company’s finance leaders need to think creatively, adapt quickly and turn AI-generated information into meaningful business insights, in addition to having strong technical skills. Questions remain over the extent to which companies will cut jobs once they’ve more fully integrated AI into their processes. Amazon’s own CEO, Andy Jassy, in June said he expects that AI will result in a smaller workforce in the next few years.
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